Epilepsy is a devastating neurological disease that affects more than three million Americans and fifty million people worldwide. There are more people with epilepsy than multiple sclerosis, cerebral palsy, muscular dystrophy and Parkinson's disease combined. Epilepsy takes more lives than breast cancer. In over thirty percent of patients, seizures are not controlled, even with state of the art medical treatments. The cognitive and emotional lives of many patients are constantly being disrupted. Improvements in treatments have come slowly as scientists have learned more about the physiological changes underlying epilepsy and have developed new methods for modifying brain activity.
Current therapy for drug resistant patients with epilepsy is surgery. However, surgery may only be appropriate for patients that have an identified single focus and for patients with a focus that is located in areas of the brain that can be resected with acceptable side effects. New alternative treatments offer hope to patients who have not had success with existing drugs. These alternative treatments include vagal nerve stimulation (VNS), deep brain electrical stimulation (DBS), or trans-cranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). These procedures may send pulses of energy at constant amplitude and frequency to control excessive brain wave activity.
These procedures may use low frequency (1-10 Hz) stimulus in order to entrain the network. Low frequency stimulation has been shown to reduce seizure frequency. For example, techniques including DBS, cortical electrical stimulation, VNS and TMS have produced seizure reduction in human subjects.